Vs Sanfrecce Hiroshima (away) 30/5/26 J League enthralling 7th place play off first leg

Sanfrecce Hiroshima 2 - 1 Kawasaki Frontale

It’s a shame that the first game I’ve missed this season is this absolutely crucial match. Oh, well actually this was just the first leg I guess. And actually thinking about it, it’s actually completely insignificant really, as the victors on this tie get the glory of finishing seventh whilst the defeated team have to put up with the humiliation of finishing eighth. 20 minutes into the match I was delighted we’d been unable to get tickets as we were completely shitting the bed, and 2-0 down. At the final whistle, well, it was still all a bit pointless, but was nice to at least get one goal back. As I never write much when I don’t actually attend a match, I’ll just use a couple of brief paragraphs to whinge and then get out of here. So here we go.

I was surprised to Yamaguchi in goal again. Maybe after the Machida game you could have said he deserved to keep his place. But he didn’t really do much against Mito and we were saved more by our opponents’ lack of composure in front of goal than by any skills from our keeper. After conceding twice in 20 minutes I was all ready to get back on the Yamaguchi moan train again, but to be honest, he did alright. I’m not completely sure he stopped anything that wasn’t fairly easy to stop and I’m not sure he was beaten by anything unsavable, but I think we’ve just got to accept that we’re going to concede goals for fun whoever is in goal. So basically no real moans here. To be honest, I thought we did alright in this match and there were definitely periods where we looked like we were significantly better than them. But we did lose though and the stats were largely in their favour. Was lovely to see evergreen cheat Sasaki Sho absolutely fuck up for our goal. Particularly after he’d cheated not too long before his brain fart. Perhaps in keeping with the general lack of meaning of this match, I didn’t get too upset about anything really. We weren’t great, neither were they. The score was reasonably reflective of the game, especially when you consider how many decent chances we wasted. If we’re on our game in the second leg I don’t think we’ll have any trouble dispatching them. That’s a big if though as times when we’ve been on our game have been quite rare this year and even when we are there’s a high chance well drop a five minute goal-conceding disaster into the middle of an otherwise solid performance. So all to play for. But whether we actually play for it is another matter.

Maybe the only thing I actually want to moan about, aside from the pitch which looked pretty bumpy on the TV screen is… have a guess… yes, you’re right, it’s the ref! Looking back through previous posts about games we’ve had with Takasaki has proved that him being shit in this match was absolutely par for the course. Even when we won 4-0 in one those previous games I still felt the need to mention the ref’s absolute lack of skills. He’s a young guy, only 33, so clearly is a bright young thing in the J League ref community. He’s also absolutely useless. The thing that pissed me off the most was him giving Marcinho a yellow for something that wasn’t even a foul and this pissedoffness was massively multiplied by the fact that before the yellow he’d totally ignored any intrusive thoughts about giving a card when some arsehole tried to break Ito’s ankle. To double down he also didn’t allow our physios on to the pitch. I think there was definitely a case to be made for it being a red but we should probably count ourselves lucky we even got the free kick. Oh, Takasaki, you’re so shit. And the fact that you stand out as being especially shit in a league where the normal level is shit, probably means that you’re are extraordinarily shit to a super level of incompetence. Watching the game in the pub I made a, (hilarious I’m sure you’ll agree), joke saying he’s probably either from Onomichi, Kure or Fukuyama or is a massive YFM fan because his decisions were so biased. I did a quick Google and discovered that he actually is from Hiroshima! Pretty unbelievable that he can ref a game with his local team playing. Maybe the J League is certain that any kind of bias is ultimately squashed by his general shitness. Maybe to return the favour we could have Kengo ref the next match. Although Kengo would probably do everything fairly anyway. Takasaki though can fuck off.

Next up, Sanfrecce at home next weekend. I think it’s quite hard to get excited about this game but maybe the biggest incentive for the players would be to try to win it to piss off Takasaki. He’d probably cry into his purple pillows if we overturned the deficit. After that, a sweet few months where we can rebuild some kind of excitement or enthusiasm or alternatively completely forget about football. Either sounds fine to me. 

 

Team 

GK 1. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto
DF 28. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
MF 23. MARCINHO (Yellow card 35')
FW 20. MOCHIYAMA Kyosuke

Subs

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (on for YAMAMOTO 9')
FW 18. KONNO Kazuya (on for MARCINHO 69')
DF 22. UREMOVIC Filip
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten
DF 32. HAYASHI Shunsuke
FW 34. OSA Ryuki (on for ITO 69')
FW 38. KANDA Soma (on for TACHIBANADA 88')
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC (on for MOCHIYAMA 69')

Wanker of the match

An absolute gimme. It has to go to...

TAKASAKI Koji - absolutely useless referee. Should be ashamed of himself.

 

Goals

NAKAMURA (Sanfrecce) 11' 1-0
KATO (Sanfrecce) 20' 2-0
ITO (Frontale) 43' 0-1

Highlights

 

Vs FC Tokyo (home) 21/2/26 J League East match 3

 

Kawasaki Frontale 1 - 2 FC Tokyo

 

I normally try to write a nice introduction paragraph to these blog posts but this game was so awful I’ll just go with mostly repeating the same word over and over again. Shit shit shit shit shit shit shitty shit shit shit shit shit shit. Shitty shit shit shit shit shit shitty shit shit shit shit shit shit, shitty shit shit shit shit shite shit shitty shit. Shit shit shit shit shit? Shitty, shit shit shit shite shit. Shit! And you can quote me on that. Shit.

1st half - 

Appalling first half with the usual suspects doing the usual things. Or rather not doing them. Miura started better but both goals came from moves down his side. Wakizaka mostly absent again. Presumably Hasebe will change back to the previous starting line up with his first subs (he didn’t. But there was a similar lack of inspiration in the changes he did make). The Ito-not-defending criticism seems to have meant that he’s now playing behind Miura and in defensive midfield. One shot! One fucking shot! (Actually it was two as I forgot the free kick, but I think the point still stands).


2nd half - 

A slight improvement, maybe, but that’s basically saying we were totally shit as opposed to unbelievably, staggeringly shit. Like in the first half, massively out shot. No changes at half time was a surprise (and almost certainly a mistake). When the changes did come, they were the deeply uninspiring swapping of the whole of the front three with not even a hint of trying something different and instead retaining the tactics that had failed for the whole of the first half and pretty much all of the JEF game. Astonishing that Miura and Wakizaka played the whole game. I feel like I am being gaslit. Whilst I’m not going as far as some and saying Hasebe out, he has to take full responsibility for this absolute turd of a performance. Reading an auto translation of Hasebe’s post match comments, it seems that he didn’t think the game was as bad as I did. One of us is clearly out of our mind.


Good day -

I mean come on. Good day for Tokyo I guess. I think they played well. I think so, but to be honest it’s tricky to say as we were so accommodating. Can’t really say anything positive in any way about us. Maybe good day for people who like seeing misplaced passes from the club captain and for people who like to see tackles, as every time we had the ball in some space, we immediately stopped, checked back and headed for the nearest opposition player to let them have a go at getting the ball off of us. And I suppose it was a good day for Yamahara as he got his first goal for us and it was a nice one. But it still infuriates me that the club have been hyping it up on social media apparently oblivious to the fact that we got absolutely destroyed in the this game.


Bad day -

Bad day for anyone who has any connection to Frontale. Bad day for me especially as I was quite hungover for this match. Can you imagine how bad that must have been? It would have been terrible even if I was feeling well, but the unbelievable dragging time, combined with the bright sun in my eyes and the constant dull headache wasn’t the combination I was hoping for. And as you can maybe tell from the irritated tone of this blog post, I’ve only gone and put myself in the same situation today after hitting the commiseration beers a bit too heavily considering the state I was in. At least I’ve avoided the sunburn today as I’ve stayed home and stewed in my own misery instead of going out. 


Any other business -

- I think one of the most significant aspects of this game, and the two previous games, was the unbelievable amount of shots we were letting the opposition have. It was 27 to 13 in the first game, 22 to 17 in the second game and 22 to fucking 7 in this match. I can’t even begin to imagine how many goals we would have conceded if we’d had last season’s patched together back line in place. And it’s no surprise the opposition are getting so many shots as we seem to be approaching every match like a defending practice training session where after we thwart an attack we pass the ball forward and back to the apposition to give them another go. To be fair to some of the players, we probably could have got another clean sheet in this match in spite of the numerous opportunities they had if FC Tokyo hadn’t been so cheeky as to make sure their attacks went down the side where there was someone who couldn’t be bothered to do anything apart from half-hearted, actually that’s too generous, one-tenth-hearted attempts to stroll back into position, usually long after the ball was in the back of the net. Of course we don’t want to be facing so many chances, but if you want to be slightly positive you could say it’s a miracle we haven’t got battered every game. We have a goal keeper who’s trying his best, two centre backs, a right back and a couple of defensive midfielders who are trying to stem the tide, but ahead of them it basically seems to be a bunch of mannequins who the ball is just bouncing off of. On the rare occasions we did manage to get into their half without passing the ball directly the them, it was either a case of Erison (or later on Romanic) competing for the ball and then having no-one to help them out in any way, or a case of us making a quick break and with the goal beckoning deciding to slow things down and play the ball backwards. Even with a minute left in the game we were still patiently passing the ball around at the back. Absolutely fucking useless. And absolutely no sign of any other options or ideas. Just plugging away with the same formation that we’ve been playing for years, now being done to dramatically diminishing returns.

- In the last post I brought up Hasebe’s tactical adjustment screwdriver. Against Kashiwa he’d tuned things a bit too far towards the attacking and forget about defending end of the scale. Against JEF he adjusted too far the other way and removed any hope of attacking. In this match, he couldn’t quite decide what to do and in his twiddling back and forth accidentally broke both the screw and the screwdriver. All out attack is one kind of approach. As is backs-against-the-wall full hearted defending. Both perhaps have their merits. In this match we abandoned both of them and went for shocking defending and almost no attacking. Hasebe definitely tweaked things a bit from the Chiba game where online geniuses were commenting that Ito wasn’t defending enough, perhaps ignoring the fact that he really is supposed to focus more on the whole attacking thing given that he’s playing up front. It was clear that Hasebe had told the wingers to sit back and join in with the defence a bit more. When Miura actually could be bothered to move his lazy arse he was more often than not ahead of Ito who seemed to have been cowed into sitting in front of the centre backs at times. This probably didn’t really help us keep the ball when we got out of our own half. When Marcinho came on he was doing the same thing, and let’s be honest, we don’t really want Marcinho defending with his straight-red-cards-for-shocking-tackles record. It’s possibly significant that both of these players were playing in front of Miura so maybe they felt like they had to try to cover for some of his absolutely-don’t-give-a-shit moments.

- Hasebe has some work to do now. Our next match is Mito at home, on paper one of our easier fixtures. He needs to make some changes. Will have have the guts to drop Miura. I don’t think so. Wakizaka will almost certainly not get dropped. I wouldn’t be surprised if he goes back to the starting line up he used for the first two games. I think the scariest thing is that he’s used pretty much the same players for every match. Ozeki was strongly linked with a move overseas before the start of the season but he has hardly got a look in. Kanda is… nobody knows. But I guess we’ve been playing with the same formation where whoever plays up front just looks completely isolated so we have to presume that if he plays there the same thing will happen to him too. I know we had quite a lot of people who weren’t training recently due to a variety of reasons. I really hope that those reasons sort themselves out soon. Hasebe says he’s picking the team based on the form players are showing so if that’s true, presumably he’ll be dropping Miura and Wakizaka, right? And I don’t think Yamamoto, who Hasebe dropped due to him playing terribly this year but then turned to as his great hope from the bench, should be playing either at the moment. I know this won’t happen, but even if we only have the same group of players available for the next match and we stick to the same formation, (which it seems we most likely will do, after all, if it ain’t broke… oh actually it is totally fucking broken…), we can definitely put out a starting line up that is much more likely to get the job done. Uremovic should be playing, I reckon. Move Matsunagane to right back (or put Noda there), play Yamahara at left back, Kawahara and Tachibanada in front of them and Ozeki ahead of them. And it probably doesn’t matter which three play up front, but maybe tell them to try to score a goal instead of get a world record for consecutive passes in a non-threatening area. I know Ito wants to play on the left, but it’s definitely the case that him playing on the right last year was a lot more effective than he’s been so far this year. And don’t forget all the exciting young players we have. Hasebe apparently has forgotten them. He’s got to do something after we finally got exactly what we deserved for two or maybe even three games where we have got totally battered. 


WOW!

Skipping this again as the main contenders I can think of are employed by our club and that wasn’t really the aim for this section. Ref was cack again, but that’s just par for the course.


Next up Mito. Come on Hasebe, do something please. Maybe we can keep the opposition shot count under 20 this time? Is that too much to ask?  

 

Team

GK 49. Svend BRODERSEN
DF 29. YAMAHARA Reon
DF 2. MATSUNAGANE Yuto
DF 3. TANIGUCHI Hiroto (Yellow card 90')
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento
MF 41. IENAGA Akihiro
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto (Yellow card 59')
MF 17. ITO Tatsuya
FW 9. ERISON

Subs

GK 21. HAYASAKA Yuki
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki (on for KAWAHARA 73')
MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for TACHIBANADA 88')
MF 18. KONNO Kazuya (on for IENAGA 56')
DF 22. Filip UREMOVIC
FW 23. MARCINHO (on for ITO 56')
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten
DF 30. NODA Hiroto 
FW 91. Lazar ROMANIC (on for ERISON 56')


Man of the match

 

Goals

MARCELO RYAN (FC Tokyo) 18' 0-1
YAMAHARA (Frontale) 31' 1-1
MUROYA (FC Tokyo) 37' 1-2

 

Highlights

Vs Sanfrecce Hiroshima (home) 30/11/25 J League match 37

Kawasaki Frontale 1 - 2 Sanfrecce Hiroshima

On this blog I generally try to steer clear of anything too informative and instead focus on the other more... interesting maybe... (maybe not) stuff. With this match that is something of a relief as this was for the most part a pretty tedious encounter with opponents who also had nothing to play for. They did seem to be a bit more up to the job though, as perhaps demonstrated by the relative league positions of the two teams. The most exciting thing from a Frontale point of view was maybe the starting line up. Well, perhaps exciting isn’t the right word. Given that since the previous game we’ve found out that plenty of players are leaving. They are Sung-Ryong, (his choice I believe), Jesiel (no new contract offered), Ando (no new contract offered, and will retire), and Kurumaya (think a new contract was possible but he felt he wasn’t up to it and is retiring). All of these departures are sad for me and I’ll deal with them later. But with this in mind it was nice to see Jesiel and Kurumaya start at centre back. Given that we have nothing to play for, it was great to see Hasebe give them an opportunity to say goodbye to the fans. Not sure why Sung-Ryong didn’t get the same opportunity and instead had to start on the bench. If he’d been able to start we could have brought on Ando for the last few minutes and given them all one last chance to play. I would have thought Hasebe would have been up for it, so maybe it was a decision driven by a player’s wishes perhaps. It’s nice to see Hasebe is an emotional human being. There’s no way Oniki would have done that. I remember countless end of season dead-as-a-doornail rubbers where he continued with exactly the same players as always. I was pleased to see Sung-Ryong get a clean sheet for the time he was on the pitch. Unfortunately we had conceded two really soft goals before he'd made it on to the pitch. I thought Jesiel really looked like he had a point to prove and I think he proved it. Kurumaya did well too, I thought. It was especially nice to see him finish the game playing at left back where I feel he really belongs, Well maybe it’s not so nice because that situation came about due to an injury to Sasaki. Hopefully it’s not serious. But it was satisfying to see Kurumaya’s career come to an end where it started. 

I felt we were kind of lucky to be drawing at half time. It’s a strange thing to say as we were leading up until the 48th minute. We hadn’t done much though and had looked in trouble on a few occasions. At the same time, I think we could have felt disappointed to be drawing at half time and indeed to lose the game, as the goals we conceded were very very soft. I still don’t have much confidence in Yamaguchi. I feel like people think he’s great because he makes some dramatic saves, (perhaps with the drama turned up to transform a regulation save into a dramatic one. There was one occasion in the match when he did a high flying dive and palmed the ball off the pitch even though it was way off target and was going off anyway. It was kind of reminiscent of the goal he seems to concede once a match where he pats the ball to the unmarked attacker at the back post, but on this occasion there was no-one there so instead he put it out for a corner). The fact is though, that it looked like he dived way too late for the first one and for the second goal just sat down rather than trying to save it. Of course it’s not all his fault, but you could tell he felt at least slightly responsible because he didn’t scream and shout too much at his defenders like he usually does. There have been rumours about a possible new keeper coming in who would presumably be the number one for next year. Given that we only have two goalies on the books now, (or maybe three if Hayasaka comes back from his loan) and one of them is Lee, with absolutely zero experience, there will definitely be something happening in that area of the pitch. 

Maybe a quick mention of the ref here. The last time we had Takasaki we won 4-0 but I still said the ref had had a shocker. On this occasion it was amateur hour again I thought. Reckon we might have got a little lucky with Ito's yellow and the card probably contributed to him being subbed at half time. It was a shame as he was our only attacking threat really. Erison was trying his best but the ref seemed to give every challenge he was involved in as a foul against him. The thing that pissed me off the most was when the dozy bastard of a ref totally blocked Kawahara from getting the ball and then gave him a yellow afterwards for complaining. Reckon Sanfrecce could have had their keeper sent off for a handball outside the box in the first half. I thought it was handball and so did Erison, (who was quite a but closer), but maybe the fact that the ball didn’t go out of play for a few minutes afterwards diluted the possibility of it being reviewed. To be honest we'd had more than enough VAR in the match anyway. But it would have been fun to see Osako get sent off. 

What else do I need to say here before I get on to the players leaving? Maybe the fact that it’s pretty bad that we couldn’t really trouble Sanfrecce's creaking Grandads back three. To be honest though, I still don’t think we would have scored yet if we were still playing now. Can’t really blame our players for being on the beach already though. I don’t think they were slacking particularly, but definitely there was a feeling of a bit of pointlessness about our play. Sanfrecce’s long throws were gross, as any long throws are. I guess the occasional one could be excused and is maybe something we should try as I think Sai can do them, but the endless dithering over their stupid little fucking towels was really getting on my nerves. But at least it gave me something to get involved with, as the rest of the match was quite dull. The only thing that is in any way interesting about the one remaining match away at Urawa is the possibility that they will do their silent treatment thing again that they’ve been doing in the last few matches. Hopefully they will all stay after the game and continue the silence all through the end of season ceremony too as then the train will be a lot better. Would be lovely to beat them on the last day of the season.  Looking back, this year has been a mixed bag and I don't think we’ve really actually done the whole season of transition thing that people expected particularly. Maybe we’re saving that for next year, (god help us…). With one game to go, as long as we don’t get hammered and concede four goals in our next game we will have got more points, scored more goals, conceded less goals and finished higher than last year. So even though some points of this season have been deeply disappointing, not losing on the final day will mean that our hosts will be even more disappointed. Again. As they are pretty much every year. In a intensely amusing way. 

With four players leaving, and the end of season ceremony, we actually spent more time in the stadium after the match than we did when the actual game was taking place. I definitely wanted to stay though as I wanted to show my appreciation for the players who were on their way out. Regular readers will know I love Sung-Ryong so obviously I’m gutted about him going. However, perhaps the time has come. I don’t think he deserved to be demoted to second fiddle this year, but at the same time, I’m not sure he would have been the answer to play in every game. Definitely a department that needs attention in the off season. I suspected that Jesiel might go, but I thought he would want to go back to Brazil, given he’s just had a baby. Apparently though he wanted to stay with us and will remain in Japan. It’s still a massive frustration for me that he had his career slightly ruined by Oniki who played him straight back from injury in a totally pointless end of season game away at Sagan Tosu and then he got seriously injured again. Definitely he has been quite injury prone in recent years, but he also has consistently been one of our best defenders. I hope he can stay injury free and show us what we’re missing. Ando seems to have been unceremoniously dumped which is a shame more from an emotional point of view rather than a practical one. There is a certain irony in him not getting a new contract after a season in which he has played a lot more in than in the last five or six years put together. He’s been an amazing servant to the club, so I hope he can be offered a position in the club somewhere. I kind of admire Kurumaya’s decision to retire. He definitely could have continued playing at a lower level, but leaves us having been a one club man. I was never sure about him wanting to move to centre back, but I guess with Nobori, and then Sasaki, and then Miura at the club, he was probably going to get more of a chance in the middle. It would have been interesting if we’d tried him in a back three. I remember him playing there at times near the start of his career. I will always consider him as a left back though. Maybe if Sasaki is inured we might see him play left back away at Urawa! All of the farewell videos were of course tear jerking. I think Jesiel’s speech affected me the most as he was clearly gutted. I mentioned above Hasebe’s compassion in playing most of the players leaving one more time being a very welcome thing. This was in stark contrast to the kind of ruthlessness when it comes to moving people on that maybe people would say is essential for our club to progress. Maybe it is essential, but it’s also quite out of character for us, so it came as a bit of a shock. I don’t know if it was a business decision made by the chairman, who once again in the end of season ceremony made himself appear quite unlikeable. As Sung-Ryong started his farewell speech which he was making in Japanese with “Sung-Ryong desu” Hasebe giggled, apparently with real affection. At the same time the chairman stood stony-faced looking like he was scanning the crowd for dissenters who he could get thrown out of the stadium. 

 

There has been some criticism of him for his lack of understanding of football and some of his decisions and reactions. I still remember him not understanding why Chanathip wanted to play football rather than train and just sit in the stands. I wonder if that signing, and maybe also the signing of Gomis, were his idea, to extend our reach in Asia and raise our profile overseas, with the ultimate aim being to get more MONEY MONEY MONEY! And then there’s also the upheaval amongst the staff which also might have something to do with him. You can’t help feel that we’ve lost our way a bit recently and it just happens to have coincided with his tenure at the top of the club. Basically, I’m still quite suspicious of him. As I’ve probably made abundantly clear. 

Well that all went on a lot longer than you might have expected for such a boring and pointless game. As I said above, hopefully we can finish the season with a bit of excitement away at Urawa. It’s not too much to ask, is it? And then we get a nice break and all the fun of the off-season. There’s definitely some work to be done before we’re back playing again in early February. My regular pre-match drinking establishment is called Progress, and whilst I think that could be said in some ways about 2025, I remain cautiously hopeful that we could see some more forward steps in 2026. Nice to finish on something positive! 

 

Team

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis 
DF 31. VAN VERMESKERKEN Sai

DF 4. JESIEL (Yellow card 84') 

DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
MF 19. KAWAHARA So (Yellow card 72') 
MF 6. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto 
FW 17. ITO Tatsuya (Yellow card 33') 
FW 9. ERISON

FW 23. MARCINHO

Subs

GK 1. Sung-Ryong JUNG (on for YAMAGUCHI 81')
GK 21. ANDO Shunsuke

MF 16. OZEKI Yuto (on for MARCINHO 72')
DF 22. Flip UREMOVIC (on for SASAKI 61')
DF 27. KAMIHASHI Ryota
DF 30. NODA Hiroto (on for VAN WERMESKERKEN 81')
MF 34. YAMAICHI Shuto

FW 38. KANDA Soma
FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for ITO 46')

Goals

ITO (Frontale) 12' 1-0
KAWABE (Sanfrecce) 45+4' 1-1
NAKAMURA (Sanfrecce) 56' 1-2

Highlights  

Vs Nagoya Grampus (home) 15/2/25 J League match 1

Kawasaki Frontale 4 - 0 Nagoya Grampus

Hmmm, what is this strange feeling? Perhaps some kind of optimism? It’s been a while. Even at the end of last year when we were getting some good results I still don’t think we could say we were that optimistic. But now… well, we can start to dream a little. I should add to this that there should be a massive caveat to all of this. We have only played two games and the quality of the opposition in both is perhaps a bit of a mystery at this time of year. But, well, eight goals scored and none conceded in two games is not to be sniffed at. Seven different goal scorers too. In this game we had four goals all scored by products of our academy. But, yes, it’s still early days, so whilst we can enjoy these two wins, let’s not get too carried away. With the next game fast approaching, I’m getting this post out with the usual lack of detail and plenty of snark that you’d expect.

First, let’s deal with some stuff about us. It was a bit of a bummer to lose Sasaki to injury so early on in the game, but maybe not a surprise when you consider the way Nagoya seemed to have come prepared to play. He picked up his injury after being booted in the waist/guts by a flying Nagoya player. Naturally, we didn’t get a free kick. The injury is a bit of a mystery as he walked off the pitch quite freely but it seemed clear quite quickly that he couldn’t continue. Maybe a rib or something. Not sure, but I hope it’s not serious. Ito not being anywhere near the squad suggests that he’s injured. Likewise the fact that we haven’t seen anything of Ienaga yet. But as I apparently never tire of saying recently, it’s a bit difficult to judge these things from just two games. And it probably won’t get any easier after our next dead rubber match in the ACL on Tuesday. I guess it will be interesting to see if we get rotation in that match. We almost lost Sai to injury too after he got elbowed in the face whilst jumping for a header. The ref thought it was only a yellow card worthy physical assault though. More about him later. Aside from commenting that it was great to see Yamauchi score and assist for a goal that perhaps only Miyagi or Erison would have had the nerve to try and score, I guess I should praise some players and zoom out a bit and say something about the game as a whole. There are plenty of people I can praise. Patrick Verhon did well I thought. Kawahara also had a really good game. And Miura is now really showing what he can do. I would praise Yamaguchi for his second consecutive clean sheet, but the fact is that in those two games the opposition have only had one shot on target so he hasn’t been very busy. Perhaps that’s due to Takai and Maruyama looking good and solid in front of him. I wonder if Maruyama left Nagoya in bad circumstances. I say this because he looked very happy to have beaten them. 

 

Unlike against Pohang where we went with a 4-4-2 with Wakizaka up front alongside, (or perhaps slightly behind Yamada), in this match we were back to 4-3-3. But it differed a bit from late Oniki’s 4-2-3-1 and looked more like a 4-1-2-3 or maybe a 4-1-2-2-1, with one defensive midfielder, two attacking midfielders in front, two wide players and one central striker. Other people seem to disagree and say that we played with two defensive midfielders, but I think it was more a case of either Kawahara or Yamamoto staying back whilst the other surged forward. They seemed to be swapping positions quite smoothly. I always think that formations are kind of in the eye of the beholder anyway, but it definitely felt like there were always two midfielders ahead of one who was staying further back. (I realise that this sentence would be true in every situation except for when two or more of them are standing in a perfectly straight line, but you know what I mean, don’t you?). With no Ienaga in the team the wide players did stay a lot more in their positions too, which I think also really helps. I think maybe if Ienaga comes back into the team it should be more in a Wakizaka type spot so that we can preserve our width. This is all starting to sound a little too informed so let’s knock that on the head right now. To add a note of negativity to this overly positive post, once again, we were pretty average in the first half before coming into the game in the second, this match going very similarly to the one against Pohang. But if that is the way we play now and we keep getting these kind of results, I’m sure we’ll all be happy. 45 minutes to feel out the opposition before accelerating and taking advantage of what we’ve learned from the first half, smashing in goals for fun. Presumably this will all come crashing down soon, but it’s been fun while it has lasted.

I think there’s still a bit of bad feeling between us and Nagoya after their dubious match postponing antics a few seasons ago. Since then, we’ve struggled to do well against them, in spite of our intensified urge to beat them, Nagoya normally coming out on top. So this was a nice bit of revenge. And the physical approach they came with getting bested by our attacking is the perfect type of revenge. They were pretty dirty in the first half I thought, but we weren’t really getting much protection from the ref. The return of Mateus to their team looked like being something to worry about. I was surprised to see that his hair seems to have turned white. I guess that is due to the very real worry of going to Saudi Arabia for a big payday and discovering that you have so much money that you don’t know what to spend it on. Must be a terribly anxiety inducing situation. Along with their aim of booting us around the pitch, in the first half they did come quite close to troubling us. Thankfully their shooting wasn’t up to scratch. Right now we are probably getting a bit of luck go our way. Long may that continue! Mateus seemed to have a bit of a strop when he got subbed, walking straight down the tunnel. Lovely! Little was he to know that we were going to score from the free kick he ridiculously gifted us by catching the ball before it had left the pitch. Also lovely! Some Nagoya fans online seem to think the goal should have been ruled out for offside, one keyboard warrior saying that it was clearly offside, but wasn’t disallowed because VAR didn’t have the correct angle, somewhat undermining his conviction that there was any clarity there. Perhaps DAZN has angles that the VAR people don’t get, eh? It did look close though, so maybe we got a bit of luck go our way again. But then again, the whole VAR thing is supposed to be ruling out clear and obvious errors. I always think that this makes lengthy checks slightly less credible. We had to check over and over for literally minutes to have enough evidence that the mistake was so clear that it didn’t need lengthy checking… oh.

Whilst we’re on officiating, It would be remiss of me not to say that the ref Takasaki had another disaster of a game. We haven’t encountered him since 2023 and when writing about that game I said he was ‘by far the worst ref we’ve had for absolutely years!’. The intervening 18 months apparently haven’t changed him or my opinion of him. He was a disaster in the first half, making decisions apparently at random. I wondered if in search of the refereeing holy grail of consistency he thought his best chance of fulfilling the brief was to consistently give every decision to Nagoya. Consistent! Then maybe I thought that perhaps his attempt at consistency was to consistently get every decision wrong. But that wasn’t the case. It was just a big old mess of randomness. It seems he’s still only 32, so in theory he has plenty of time to improve, but given that everything I wrote about him in 2023 is still glaringly present in 2025, I suspect that however long you polish this turd of a ref, he’ll still be incompetent. It would be nice if the referees got even just a little bit better, but one thing that remains an absolute constant through every passing year is that the officials are useless and in the case of Takasaki, you could probably get more accurate results by rolling a dice to make the decisions rather than having someone who’s supposed to know what he is doing in charge. Never looks good to moan when you’ve won 4-0, but for refs, I think we all need to keep expressing how utterly terrible they are. It’s a tough job for sure, but it would be nice if they weren’t quite so shit at it, wouldn’t it?

Next up Central Coast Mariners at home in the ACL on Tuesday. They are rock bottom of the ACL group, so in theory this should be our easiest game of the campaign. Presumably a heavy defeat for us coming soon then! After that, we’re away to Kashiwa on Saturday. Fingers crossed we can keep these good times rolling through those two games. 

Team

GK 98. YAMAGUCHI Louis
DF 5. SASAKI Asahi
DF 2. TAKAI Kota
DF 35. MARUYAMA Yuichi
DF 13. MIURA Sota
MF 19. KAWAHARA So
MF 77. YAMAMOTO Yuki
MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto
FW 28. PATRICK VERHON
FW 20. YAMADA Shin
FW 23. MARCINHO (Yellow card 3')

Subs

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong
DF 7. KURUMAYA Shintaro
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento (on for YAMAMOTO 77')
FW 9. ERISON (on for YAMADA 82')
DF 15. TANABE Shuto
FW 24. MIYAGI Ten (on for MARCINHO 82')
MF 26. YAMAUCHI Hinata (on for PATRICK VERHON 77')
DF 31. VAN WERMESKERKEN Sai (on for SASAKI 16')
DF 44. CESAR HAYDAR

My Frontale Man Of The Match

Normally it would be easy to decide who to hand this award to after a 4-0 win, but truly, there were so many good performances that I think I’ll have to give it to…

THE WHOLE TEAM - well done everyone. Spreading the goals around and making it a joy to watch us again. Bravo! 

Goals

TAKAI (Frontale) 58' 1-0
YAMADA (Frontale) 67' 2-0
YAMAUCHI (Frontale) 79' 3-0
MIYAGI (Frontale) 88' 4-0

Highlights

Vs Kyoto Sanga (home) 12/11/23 J League match 32

Kawasaki Frontale 3 - 3 Kyoto Sanga

Sorry this is a bit late but I had an unpleasant start to the week as I think I caught the flu. Given that, I'm a bit worried that I was at the Frontale game on Sunday and then the Brave Thunders game too, (deal on tickets as it was a collaboration with Frontale. Have never been to a basketball game before and it was a lot of fun). This morning I’m feeling slightly human again so am sitting down and trying to get this post out of the way as quickly and painlessly as possible. Time always dulls the details and when you add three days of high fever to this, you can expect that there won’t be much that makes sense in this post but I’ll do my best from the notes I made. Here we go.

People excited by the starting line up and imagining we were changing formation and approach probably don’t know Oniki as well as they think they do. Naturally, no left back in the line up means we’ll probably be playing an attacker there. And so we did. You could say there was some rotation as Takai was in for Yamamura and the front three were changed. It’s basically the same 15 or 16 players still though. I think the last time Takai started at Todoroki he had a nightmare and was directly responsible for three opposition goals. On this occasion he was the solid link in the defensive chain and Jesiel instead was giving away goals for fun. Their second was particularly shocking, when it appeared that Jesiel was stuck in slow motion and could only look on as the Kyoto player easily beat him by… not really doing anything. I suspect that Jesiel has been rushed back from his injury and is feeling the pace. If only we had a manger who actually knew how to rotate, particularly in games that are absolutely meaningless for us! It was a shock when he was replaced at half time though, but definitely the right decision as he’d been really out of sorts. Not sure why Joao also got subbed, but that does seem to be Oniki’s reaction to a poor first half (remove the midfielder who isn’t Wakizaka or Tachibanada). If only we could get to a situation where we could actually choose the right players or approach right from the kick off if would be nice! So terrible have all of our first halves been recently, that if there was a bar in the stadium, it really wouldn’t be worth leaving it till half time. There’s one thing we can always guarantee recently and that’s that we’ll concede for fun in the first half. At least in this game we managed a couple of goals in the first 45 minutes and they were nice ones. Miyashiro was back starting again and scored a good goal and got an assist for Kobayashi's goal. I wonder what might have happened if Oniki hadn't dropped Miyashiro (our then top scorer) completely from our squads earlier in the year? Anyway, to sum us up in this game, we still look utterly surprised that teams will come and try to score goals against us, totally unprepared for what they might try to do, struggle to get decent shots in from our normal ponderous build up play, and will apparently persist in playing anyone at left back apart from an actual left back. I’m surprised he hasn’t given Kamifukumoto a go there yet. It’s weird that in a year when we are targeting reclaiming the league title we are woefully off the pace and when we haven’t mentioned the ACL and are in tough group we seem to be negotiating it pretty well. I think the only conclusion we can draw is that we’re not very good at doing what we want to do, or perhaps that our manager's plans to get what we want are so poor that they have no chance of succeeding. I guess the even more bizarre thing is that Oniki has never really been one for prioritising any one competition. In anything other than very early Emperor’s Cup rounds against amateur or university teams, Oniki’s gone with pretty much the same group of players and the same approach. Surely it can’t only be me who has noticed that they don’t work, can it?

On to the opposition and the officials. Let’s start with Kyoto as there’s not much to say about them really. They haven’t really looked like they were in relegation trouble for a while this season but as it comes to the crunch they find themselves hanging around in the wrong area again. So should be easy picking for a resolutely mid-table team like us, right? Well, of course not. Previous to this game they’d only scored 33 goals in their 31 games, but we let them score three against us. It seems to me that Kyoto have three main skills, time wasting, play acting and cutting through our defence with ease and scoring against us. Thankfully they devoted the second half to the first two having had their fill of the latter in the first half. I don't really have anything moany to say about them. We all know that with their manager they will be well organized and difficult to break down, We probably didn’t imagine that they’d cut us to pieces though. I normally get really angry about their captain but the only bitchy note I wrote about this game was that ‘their keeper is annoying’. I’m not sure the point has guaranteed their safety. Three would have done and looked likely for most of the match. They are definitely not the team I want to go down the most who are in the bottom five. Let’s move on to the officials or more accurately the ref. Takasaki was a new name for me and as I tweeted, this usually is a bad sign but I wasn’t going to pre-judge him. I should have trusted my gut though as he was by far the worst ref we’ve had for absolutely years! Apparently unaware of basic rules and almost always looking in the wrong direction at all times, I felt like he was a youngster who in their first proper game was determined to show that he wasn’t going to play favorites and give decisions to the home side and overcompensated the other way. He also seemed to be making every decision by using a complicated system of dice rolling like the dungeons and dragons nerd he probably is. (Sorry D&D fans, you probably weren’t expecting a dig at you here, but at the same time, I guess you’re kind of used to that kind of thing happening). The first dice roll was for whether to have his eyes open or not, then another roll for the direction in which to look, one for whether to blow his whistle or not, one for which team to give the decision to. There was probably another dice to roll later on when writing his report to decide how to justify his totally random decisions in the game. I can’t help but feel that if his first dice roll had come up with eyes closed and whilst his eyes were closed someone had nicked all of his dice and therefore he had to officiate the rest of the game by sound alone, we would have had a more consistent and accurate performance from him. 

 

Ironically, the most egregious error he made, which cost us a goal and was confirmed as a horrible mistake by J League Judge Replay, (presumably to absolutely no consequence to the referee), was one that I didn’t see at all. Probably because I already had my head in my hands as we were clearly about to gift the opposition a goal. Little did I know that it was the ref who’d passed the ball out wide for the Kyoto play to make the assist. Our players surrounded the ref afterwards which is never a good look, but is something we don’t normally do, so I guessed something shocking had happened. Perhaps he thought he’d play an advantage instead of giving the absolutely obviously correct drop ball decision, as maybe he wants to get a reputation as a ref who lets the game flow. I’d like to see his career flow straight down the plughole if I’m being honest right now. Apparently VAR can’t intervene in this situation as there wasn't a foul committed, so it’s good to see that VAR, with its strictly prescribed guidelines, is ruling out those errors that we all care the most about, namely whether a striker’s toenail is offside or not, but failing when it comes to the reason for its whole existence, ie. fixing clear and obvious errors. Not saying I think it should be used more. I personally think we should just dump it now and forget it ever existed. Surely no-one thinks the game is better with it? I don’t think VAR was used at all in this game, which suggest that for a ref with very little experience and apparently very little skill, Takasaki was quite confident in his own abilities. Oh well, at least it wasn’t a shocking refereeing error in a potentially title deciding game…. oh 😺. Not being a fan, (and that’s quite an understatement), of either Vissel Kobe or Yokohama F Marines, it has been a bit difficult for me to decide who I would prefer to see win the league this year, but perhaps Vissel Kobe winning it, in part thanks to a truly awful refereeing cock up and therefore really irritating YFM fans whilst at the same time undermining Vissel’s first league title, well, that would suit me just fine I think. But there are still two games left, so plenty of chance for some more clowning from the guys who apparently know the rules of the game but seem to forget them every time they step on the the pitch and get their hands on their whistle. Some people have welcomed the introduction of the J League Judge Replay program to draw attention to the mistakes that are made, but it doesn’t seem that them highlighting previous cock ups has made it is any less likely that future cock ups will happen. So perhaps in the end, the whole thing only has the purpose of undermining the refs further. I would imagine that they don’t watch it anyway. After all, they are the experts and have nothing to learn. I don’t know if there have been more mistakes this year, but it feels like it. I know it’s a hard job, but is it too much to ask that some of them aren’t absolutely terrible at doing it?

Next up Kashima at home in another one of those pointless league games. Then we have Johor at home in a very important ACL game only four days later. What’s the betting he’ll start pretty much the same team for both of those games? Quite high I’d say. Sorry this post is a mess. I've had to make a lot of corrections already in my post-fever state and have probably missed some more. But you don't come here for accuracy anyway, do you? You come here for the wonderful insight, right? Sorry that is once again absent too. And not even much trolling of the opposition. See! I clearly am still a bit ill.

Team

GK 1. JUNG Sung-Ryong

DF 13. YAMANE Miki

DF 4. JESIEL

DF 29. TAKAI Kota

DF 30. SEGAWA Yusuke

MF 6. JOAO SCHMIDT
MF 8. TACHIBANADA Kento

MF 14. WAKIZAKA Yasuto

FW 11. KOBAYASHI Yu

FW 18. Bafetimbi GOMIS

FW 33. MIYASHIRO Taisei

 

Subs

GK 99. KAMIFUKUMOTO Naoto

DF 2. NOBORIZATO Kyohei

MF 16. SEKO Tatsuki (on for JOAO SCHMIDT 46')

FW 20. YAMADA Shin (on for MIYASHIRO 71')
FW 23. MARCINHO (on for GOMIS 61')

DF 31. YAMAMURA Kazuya (on for JESIEL 46')

FW 41. IENAGA Akihiro (on for SEGAWA 79')

 

Goals

 

FUKUDA (Kyoto) 7' 0-1    

MIYASHIRO (Frontale) 19' 1-1

TOYOKAWA (Kyoto) 42' 1-2

TOYOKAWA (Kyoto) 45+1' 1-3

KOBAYASHI (Frontale) 45+5' 2-3

WAKIZAKA (Frontale) PEN 90+1' 3-3

Highlights